Slaves, politics and sharks: An interview with Paul Friese; Founder of the Bali Shark Rescue Centre

I recently went to Bali to meet up with the guys from Bali Shark Rescue Centre; Paul Friese (founder) and Sean Samer. We chatted about everything from how Paul ended up creating the first shark rescue centre in the world, to how slavery has become a prominent issue in the shark finning trade. After our chat I had an amazing dive with some of the residents (footage at end of blog). At the beginning of the film you will notice the camera moving around, this is the sharks biting the camera in response to the electrical field that it is emitting.

I hope you enjoy…

How did you come up with the idea for the Bali Shark Rescue Centre?

Paul: That’s an interesting story. I purchased an apartment in Bali and rented out my place in Honolulu, Hawaii (where I am from) with the intention of starting a shark cage diving business off the shelf of Nusa Dua. I had read that within the coral triangle sharks were relatively safe from exploitation so I thought ‘yeah, I can do this’, however, the fisherman figured out the shark numbers were high here and poached all the sharks out of the area, so I scraped the idea. It worked out for the better as the water is very rough out here and people tend to get very sea sick.

It was what happened next that started me on the path to building a shark rescue centre. On April 16th 2011 I got a call from my local helpers notifying me that some fishermen had killed a 2.3 m tiger shark. The guy got it by accident and had never caught a shark before and didn’t know what to do with it, so they killed it, chopped it up into steaks and took it into their village. That night I went to the bar to have a couple of beers and watch the sunset over Seminyak. I had this napkin in front of me and I drew a floating pontoon that had coconut trees in the corners and was moored to the bottom. I remember always seeing baby sharks in the trash can at the end of the day because their fins were too small, a complete waste, and I thought to myself ‘I think I can build a shark nursery’. I ended up building that pontoon but now had to work out how to rescue the sharks. I had made the move without really putting any systems in place.

I got the word out to some of the local fisherman that if you get any sharks in your nets that are still alive, call us, don’t kill them, and we’ll come and collect them. We got a call from a guy in Nusa Dua that had a litter of ten baby black tips, so I said “ok how much do you want for them?”. He responded Rp 1.5 million ($150 AUD) and I thought ‘is that for one or all of them?’. I said if he can bring them here and they’re still alive we will give him Rp1.5 million. He agreed and the next thing we know he shows up with ten sharks. So that sort of set the price in my head of $15 AUD for a 0.5 m shark. I asked the fishermen that if I hadn’t bought them from him what would you have done and he said “I would have taken them to the fish market” (where they would have been sold off for meat balls and soup). I never heard from him again, but he told others (coconut wireless). We started hearing from other fishermen but I definitely did not want to create a bounty for the sharks. Obviously in five years I’ve had 178 sharks which certainly doesn’t indicate a bounty. I could probably buy 178 sharks a week if I wanted to but that’s not the intent. I gave the fishermen an opportunity to do something different which they had never had in their life. They actually really wanted to keep the sharks alive and they were sick of killing everything. I asked them if they ate the sharks and they replied “no way, its horrible meat”. The meat usually ends up going to the lower classes and used for street food. I believe the Bali Shark Rescue Centre is revolutionising the Sea World model; saving sharks, providing an education and developing an opportunity for research.

Where the shark will live until they are ready to be released

How many sharks have you saved?

Paul: We’ve saved 178 sharks. The most interesting rescue was a 1.6 m whitetip shark in north Bali (4 hours away). The fisherman didn’t speak much English and I don’t really speak Bahasa. I was curious as to why he had saved this shark. Usually if a shark is greater than 1 m they are too big to handle and are killed. He wants 3 million Rp for the shark but it would cost me 1 million Rp to get to north Bali and back so I said “if you can get it here alive, I’ll give you the 3 million Rp”. A truck shows up after dark with a canvas full of water, an air pump and a 1.6 m shark. The shark was fine and immediately I could tell it was pregnant. Now I knew why they didn’t want to kill it, they also knew it was pregnant. I had no problem paying that price, it was the most I had ever paid for a shark.

Whitetip reef sharks (Triaenodon obesus) in the nursery

When do you release the sharks from your centre?

I release the blacktips at 0.8 m and the whitetips at 1 m, so it’s not a time thing. I had to learn that anything under that size are easily stressed, they hyperventilate, pass out, they’re too fragile. I’ve had six occurrences of that happening. If I get one that’s bigger than a metre I’ll keep it for about 2 weeks, make sure it’s healthy, no injuries, feed it really well, and release it. A lot of people think it’s like a captivity park, which it isn’t. There have been a lot of copy cats since we established the centre.

So how did you (Sean and Paul) end up working together?

Sean: I was looking more and more into the finning that happens in Indonesia and found out that the country has the highest killing rate of sharks in the world (finning around 1 million sharks a year). However, a lot of what goes on is not documented and I would estimate it to be more like 2 million per year. I’ve loved sharks my whole life and I wanted to do something about the situation here. I typed ‘Bali sharks’ into google and the Bali Shark Rescue Centre came up. I immediately contacted Paul and we decided to work together. With what I know about sharks and his conservation efforts (which I think is amazing) it seemed like a great idea. But the harsh reality of shark conservation is not a walk in the park, it’s not for everyone. You see some heavy stuff, it’s not all about hugging sharks and releasing them, it’s more than that. You see sharks being killed and you get emotional, but you have to save what you can. Everyone wants to make the fishermen the enemy but they aren’t bad people. At the end of the day they’re just trying to feed their families, it’s the markets that they’re supplying that are the problem. And there’s a whole other story to this, some people aren’t volunteering to hunt sharks, they are being taken as slaves…

Paul: It was uncovered in 2013. I was out surfing when a dead guy washed up on the beach in Seminyak. Police were there trying to figure it out when I ran by with my surfboard. The guy had no shoes on, a long shirt, long pants, really dark, maybe in his 30’s, his hands were strong and he was a slender, skinny guy. I immediately thought ‘a discarded fisherman’. The police dismissed me and told me to go back to surfing.

A year later right before Ramadan is when all the trawlers come in. I’m there filming and you can see all of the tunas coming up out of the refrigerated holes on the boat, there was clearly a lot of man power down there in the freezers. You can see the shark carcasses with no head, no fins and no tail come off the boat. The bags containing the fins start to come off when suddenly I notice three guys walking up the ramp towards the boat. The guy in the middle is being walked on to the boat. The two guys on the outside were ‘sardining’ him, squeezing and grabbing him by his collar. It’s 12 noon and I thought ‘that doesn’t look natural’. Then I remembered the guy that had washed up on the beach and I thought ‘that’s a slave!’. I contacted my friend and he told me that he had wanted to interview a captain about the illegal fishing trade so he came down and joined me.

The captain eventually swaggers off, all pissed off, he had been in jail for two years for illegally fishing in Australian waters. His boss failed bail him out. My friend got the opportunity to interview the captain and when queried about the illegal fishing he replied “who cares about the illegal fishing trade, I have 40 slaves down there on the boat. From Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Philippines…” he starts listing off all these slaves and where they were from.

What’s interesting is at the end of 2014 we got a new president in Indonesia. He hires a lady called Suzie to run the Ministry of fisheries and she’s tough! I had been sending her some pretty knarley footage of endangered thresher sharks being split open with two babies etc. and she really took the slavery thing seriously. So she goes out with her navy and starts getting some of these illegal fishing boats. Sure enough there’s all these guys that can’t speak Bahasa and yet they all have Indonesian passports. So that was the start of it. She started confiscating all these illegal fishing boats and working with the big tuna organisations. Next thing you know she has a large scale satellite company helping her to pick off these boats. I had a theory that the sharks being caught were being transferred offshore because all of a sudden I wasn’t seeing any sharks in the commercial fisheries. Suzie went and caught some of these fish transfers in action (which are illegal). All the illegal boats rushed to this Island off Maluku (more towards Timor, Australia side) and there’s 4000 slaves dumped. It was very lucky timing in getting the new administration.

Talking with Paul (left) and Sean (right) at the Bali Shark Rescue Centre

How is the Bali Shark Rescue Centre supported financially?

Paul: Purely ecotourism. That was the big controversy because people thought I was just another SeaWorld, so I made sure I documented all the releases. The diving community often complain about shark numbers diminishing but then are reluctant to pitch in. I’ve been working with two amazing dive centres; Diversia Diving and Trawangan Dive Centre who have helped me a lot. They’re the whole reason I can release sharks, their help has been unreal. They show up with their boats, give me a place to stay, really cut down my costs, but they understand that tourists are more excited now that they’re seeing sharks on their dives, so it’s a win/win. Now more dive centres are trying to get involved, so their attitude is changing. We simply ask for them to adopt one shark which is $200 AUD. If we get 20 dive centres to adopt one shark, that’s 50 more sharks a year we can support and release.

Sean: The shark’s behaviour and therefore their response to stress differs between species. Blacktips are highly timid; they stress easily which causes their breathing to rapidly increase so you have to be much more careful with them. When we transfer the whitetip sharks it’s a 3-hour boat ride, so we have all these protocols in place to reduce their stress and increase the chance of a successful release. We currently have a 90% success rate with releases. The blacktips are released locally, 3 minutes from the nursery to prevent/ reduce stress. No one has really done this before so it’s been a bit of trial and error but now we have it down pact.

Paul: My neighbours (Gili Getaway Fast Boat) have been amazing in sponsoring the Bali Sharks program and assisting with free passes on their boat for me and my sharks. One time on their boat I had a shark that was acting erratic and it was the only time I had a small viewing hole in the box. Every 20 minutes I would check on the shark. After 40 minutes the shark was upside down. I didn’t want to mess with Gili Getaway’s schedule (they had paying guests on board) but I had to ask the captain to cut the engines and put it in neutral because I had to release this shark NOW. The captain cuts the engines and I’m grabbing scissors to cut open the box, all the while the guests are all looking on with anticipation to see what is going on. I cut the box open and release the shark into the water. It immediately comes to and swims off. Everyone starts clapping which made it really cool because they all got to be a part of it.

Blacktip reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus) in the nursery

What do you know about Mercury levels in sharks from Bali?

Paul: Their hiding this kind of stuff. One of the fishermen gave me a big chunk of meat from the dorsal of a bull shark which enabled me to test it for mercury. It recovered a level of 1.368 mg/kg {the Australian and New Zealand Food Standards Code states that the maximum level of Mercury allowed in sharks used for commercial sale is is 1.0 mg/kg} (Australia New Zealand Food Standards 2015).

There is still a lot to be done in regards to testing for mercury, but we can’t stop with the testing, we have to take it to the media and expose it. Flake is so common in fish and chip shops and many people don’t realise that they are actually eating shark that could contain high levels of mercury.

What changes have you seen in the local ecosystem since you started the release program?

Paul: When I first snorkeled the Gili biorocks it was pretty much a joke. They had these coral farms but they were suffocating in algae and less than a handful of herbivores were around to clean the reef. Instinctively I knew there must be plenty of predatory fish picking off the few herbivores that were left. Sure enough, as I swam around the reef I saw a school of Barracudas, a pretty large Trevaly and a few other predatory fish, but no sharks to keep these species in check. I knew straight away that the reef needed sharks to re-balance the system. So yes, after releasing 52 sharks around the Gilis it became obvious the sharks were beginning to re-balanced the ecosystem and now it’s alive with colour. The reefs are no longer suffocating and have been prospering well.

I hope you have enjoyed my first blog entry into ‘Sharks & Me’. To learn more about the Bali Shark Rescue Centre check out their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/balisharks/

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